Each Activity tab is like a workspace, with tools and features suited to particular types of tasks. For example, browsing data, or performing analyses. So, what happens if you want to use a tool from a different activity to the one you are currently working in? To do this with as little disruption, and as few clicks as possible, you’ll find shortcuts to those tools in the command bar. Those shortcuts are what we call Actions.
What is Actions ribbon?
Actions are what you see in the different-colored blocks under the Actions tab. These commands are applied to time series or other entities such as releases, when working in any of the Activity tabs (except style sheets and web publish). The available commands, or Actions, are steered by which time series you’ve selected.
How are Actions organized?
As you can see, the actions are divided into groups. The first thing to notice is that the color of the group reflects the color of the activity tab the action will be performed in. The second thing is that a single activity might have more than one group. For example, as you see in the image above, there is one group with options for presenting the selected time series, and another for transforming the time series, but the result of both actions will be displayed in Browse (green). Descriptions of each group are provided below. When you click on a group box it’ll expand over the other boxes. It will expand downwards if needed.
Browse
The first block you’ll see on the left, is for actions performed in Browse. If you will create chart for quick review you can add from there other time series. How to create such chart see in Visualize time series for a quick review.
Add to documents
Use the actions to add the selected series to a new document in Analytics, or to add it to any of the documents you have open in the Analytics tab at the time.
Presentation
These actions give you different options for visualizing the data in Browse. This is useful if you’d like to quickly view the data over a certain period of time (for more see Visualize time series for a quick review), or accessing the metadata in Time Series Information for example (for more see Time series information – accessing the metadata information).
Transformations
Choose from a few simple calculations to apply to the selected time series. This action results in a chart being generated in Browse - for more information see Visualize time series for a quick review.
Locate series in tree
Locate the selected series in the tree, for any of the database views. This is useful if you’ve found a time series outside of the tree structure (in Browse or Analytics) and you’d like to view the series relative to categories, subcategories or related series. For more information see Locate series in tree.
Releases
View the relevant release for the selected time series. This is useful if you’d like to add a series you just found to your list of favorites for easy access at a different point in time.
Search
Use these actions to perform a search based on the selected time series. It’s a useful way to quickly find the same type of series for other countries, for example.